A snub from Kabila

But Congo’s ruler is now irritating his allies as well as his opponents

LAURENT KABILA, Congo's president, plays by his own rules. He often turns up late for meetings, and sometimes not at all. So it was no surprise for other African leaders when he abandoned an emergency summit in Lusaka in the early hours of August 15th to attend to “important business” at home. He left the others to draft a communiqué on how best to save his country.

But Congo may be beyond salvation, for now. For the past six months the United Nations has been thinking about sending 5,500 peacekeeping troops to protect and enforce the modest mission of some 250 observers already there. But the Security Council may conclude that there is no peace to be kept.

Mr Kabila and his allies—Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia—signed up to a ceasefire at Lusaka, in neutral Zambia, a year ago. So did the three Congolese rebel movements and their Rwandan and Ugandan sponsors. An ambitious peace accord was drawn up, providing for an end to hostilities, a phased deployment of UN peacekeepers, and a process of national reconciliation. But, regardless of the ceasefire, fighting continues on several fronts, notably in the north-western province of Equateur and in the eastern border regions of North and South Kivu.

Mr Kabila determinedly puts the fighting in the context of a foreign invasion, refusing to see the rebels as anything more than Rwandan and Ugandan puppets. And that view is indeed supported by many of the Congolese living in rebel-held areas. They accuse rebel movements, such as the Rwandan-backed Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD), of having no agenda beyond their own enrichment. In rebel-held Kisangani, the Ugandan and Rwandan armies fought each other for six days in June, killing more than 600 Congolese civilians.

The Rwandan government and the RCD both recently offered to pull back thousands of their troops from frontline positions, creating a giant “disengagement zone” in Congo. But the proposal came with the precondition that the UN send in enough troops to fill the vacuum and prevent Mr Kabila from taking advantage of the gesture.

The Congolese government has been a difficult host to the UN observers, constantly vetoing missions to sensitive areas and holding out against the arrival of peacekeeping troops. Many Congolese feel that the UN is sanctioning their country's partition rather than defendingits sovereignty.

But Mr Kabila's real contempt has been reserved for Ketumile Masire, a respected former president of Botswana. Brought in, against his own better judgment, to serve as Congo's “facilitator”, Mr Masire was given a mandate to create a dialogue between government and rebels to pave the way for a national conference on Congo's political future. His exact offence is not clear, but Mr Kabila has repeatedly called for his removal, demanding that the UN or the Organisation of African Unity come up with an alternative.

In rudely rejecting both Sir Ketumile and the Lusaka summit, Mr Kabila has not just upset would-be peacemakers. He is also snubbing the allies who rode to his rescue two years ago and whose troops still prop him up. An exasperated Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president, who has lent him 12,000 soldiers in return for unspecified commercial opportunities, hinted that Mr Kabila should pay heed, and listen to his peers.